Verizon Wireless, Yahoo Executives Debate Economics of Location Data, Services
SILICON VALLEY -- Instead of being “held hostage” by companies like Google, perhaps consumers should be paid directly for their location information, a Verizon Wireless executive said. With Google, “you have to share if you want to use location at all,” said Laura Diaz, Verizon manager-new market development and strategy. Users should own data about where they go, but instead it’s applications providers that are making money on them, she said late last week at the GPS-Wireless Conference. Diaz said it would be a “great idea” if a consumer could say in effect, “fine: Take my data,” but pay up.
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Location information is valuable for providing “meaningful recommendations and powerful searches,” Diaz said. She said she often wishes that Web search results were filtered for where she is, to make the most useful pages easier to find. All too often, companies are “getting away from building things for consumers and just trying to get users,” Diaz said. It’s “happening with people like Google,” because its goal is gathering “a massive amount of data” on users for the benefit of its ad business, she said. That doesn’t necessarily produce a good experience, Diaz said. Google didn’t get back to us right away.
It’s no big deal for consumers to provide their locations as long as they receive good value from the services that the information is used for, said Michael Metcalf, Yahoo local lead for new product development. Foursquare is “pretty good” about this, said Gary Gale, Nokia director-places, location and commerce. Facebook isn’t, but the company will get it eventually, he said.
Use of location data is “going to become part of the fabric of consumer applications” broadly, Metcalf said. “The Apples and the Googles … are really interesting because they own the whole stack,” he said. So Google can combine what it knows about a user’s location with the information that the application being used there says about the person’s interests, Metcalf said.
Notices of location tracking aren’t working, Gale said. Users click on long, legalistic statements that they haven’t read but that are taken as consent to tracking, and then they're shocked to learn of the monitoring, he said. Gale, too, took a shot at Google, citing “an element of jack-of-all-trades, master of none.” He questioned how likely a company is to “offer a good experience if you're operating across such a broad” product line.
Facebook “is the growing counterweight to this,” said CEO Guylain Roy-MacHabee of Rx Networks, which combines GPS, Wi-Fi and cellular location information. “There’s room for other players to get into this” market against Google, he said. The “proximity-based social network” will be a big trend, Metcalf said. Dating and hookup sites OkCupid and Grindr are leaders in allowing users to get together when they're near each other, he said, but he knows 50 startups in the broader field. “Proximity and social networking is really interesting,” Diaz agreed. Facebook could own the business, she said.